“We offer up these young souls in glory to you, oh Ancient One. We offer up these young souls in glory to you, oh Ancient One. We offer up these young souls in glory to you, oh Ancient One...”
Cody, Cameron, Nathan, Caleb, and Oliver were, needless to say, confused when they awoke from their chloroform induced naps. One minute, they had each traveled home from their respective colleges (or high school in Oliver’s case), the next, they were… somewhere… listening to people repeat some chant of a sort. Not exactly the Friday night any of them had planned out. They were also apparently tied up, as each of them felt ropes binding their ankles and wrists.
Nathan, believing that he had once again gotten drunk and that the liquor was causing him to have weird hallucinations, was the first to say something among the group of students. “... Ughhh… Tom, stop talking with your girlfriend on the phone late at night. At least get your own room…”
Cameron, hearing the voice of someone who went to the same university as he did, called out, “Nathan?! Is that you?”
“What the--! Cameron?!” Nathan replied.
“Yeah, it’s me! What in the hell is--”
Suddenly, before Cameron could finish, he felt the broadside of a boot firmly plant itself on his mouth and silence him. Looking up, he saw someone in a red robe, whose face was completely obscured by an equally red hood… that was bent down towards him.
“It seems that our offerings stir. My brothers and sisters, let us gag them so they do not interrupt our divine canticle further.”
It was at this moment that all five of them realized the kind of situation they were in… and just what their prospects were for their immediate futures.
“LET US GO!” Nathan demanded, struggling with all of his might against his bonds.
“YEAH, WHAT HE SAID YOU FRUITY, CULTIC BASTARDS!” Cameron added.
“WHEN I GET OUT OF THESE BONDS, I’M GONNA KICK YOUR ASS!” Cody snarled.
Oliver merely resorted to shouting obscenities as loud as he could at his kidnappers.
“YOU WON’T GET AWAY WITH THIS!” Caleb shouted.
“And that last cliche is where my patience ends.”
The man who so far had been the only one to verbally acknowledge them promptly took off both his shoes and then the socks on his feet and then shoved both of them firmly into Caleb’s mouth despite his attempts to make it difficult.
“Fellow worshipers of our god, please kindly get off your lazy asses and do the same with the other four so that we may continue. It’s rude to keep the Ancient One waiting when he’s hungry, you know,” the man said over the shouts of the kidnapped students.
“Of course,” the others responded in zombie like unison. After promptly gagging the students with their own sweaty, smelly socks, they gathered back into their circle once again and resumed their chant.
As the cultist’s renewed droning continued, all the other students struggled against their bonds while Oliver remained surprisingly calm. Unlike what the cultists or his fellow kidnappees might have thought, he was not resigning to his fate, but was actually reaching for a pocket knife. His pocket knife. It was a long shot, but, considering how unprofessional these supposedly diehard human sacrificers were, he reckoned they forgot to do a thorough pat down of his person after snatching him.
Indeed, they had, much to his soaring hope. Once he had ahold of the knife, he took advantage of the cultists’ lack of attention on him and began cutting the ropes that bound his wrists.
As the cultists neared the end of their ritual, Oliver finally broke free. Quickly, he pushed himself to his feet, spit the socks out of his mouth, and lashed out at the nearest kidnapper. His plan was for the attack to stun his kidnappers long enough for him to free his ankles before running to get help. What Oliver didn’t know is that his sudden attack disrupted the ritual, causing the man he assaulted to accidentally say the wrong set of words in the ancient tongue he spoke.
After that man spoke the passage that ended the unholy ritual, all five of the captured humans were enveloped in a bright light, and then vanished into thin air.
The cultists were silent for a few minutes, before the man who botched the ritual broke the silence.
“Dammit, not again.”
As Nathan slowly returned to consciousness, he immediately noticed something that made him come kicking and screaming back to full awareness of his surroundings . Wherever he was, it stunk. BADLY. Smelling salts would have been a step up, which he would know considering how many times his buds had to use them to get him up after a particularly epic kegger.
“Ughh… what the hell?” Nathan muttered as he sat up. The first things he noticed (other than the wretched stench) was that he could not see a single thing on account of it being pitch black, and that he could hear the lazy flow of slowly running water.
Reaching out with his hands, he found the wall of wherever the heck he was and leaned up against it after slowly getting back to his two feet. Once up, he took a moment to strain his ears for any other noise that might indicate where he was. It didn’t take long for him to notice the moans and groans of someone else stirring awake.
"Where am I? Hello? Is anyone here?" Came what sounded... sort of like Cameron. Nathan wasn't entirely sure since he couldn't help but notice that while... eerily familiar, the voice sounded too hollow and coarse to be Cameron's.
“Cameron? Is that you?” Nathan cautiously asked at the darkness.
“Nathan? Glad to hear a familiar voice down… wherever we are. Do you know where we are?” the voice replied.
Figuring that the person speaking to him probably was Cameron, he answered, “No, but I think we might be in some kind of sewer or something just going off the smell. If you don’t mind me asking though, what’s up with your voice? You doing alright?”“I’m not sure man. I feel fine… if a little weird. Also, what smell? I can’t smell anything,” Cameron answered.
“Well there must be something wrong if you can’t smell that!!”
“Really? You sure you’re not just hammered and hallucinating again?”The conversation was interrupted by an insanely deep groan and an equally deep, and new, voice. “Whoever you two are, you better tell me where I am!”
Cameron and Nathan jumped back, as the voice was coming from between the two of them.
“W-Who the heck are you?” asked Cameron.
“My name is Caleb, and after waking up in the middle of some freaky ritual, I’d like to know where I’ve ended up!”
“You were kidnapped by those guys too?” Nathan asked.
“...Yes. Why do you want to know?”
“Me and Cameron over there were kidnapped too. We were with you during that whole… whatever it was. Don’t worry, we aren’t gonna do anything to you... but I’ll beat the crap out of you if you try and jump either of us in here, especially me, alright? ”
“...Alright... since I don’t think I have a choice... I’ll trust you two for now,” Caleb said.
It was then that someone else decided to rejoin the waking world, making the three other conscious persons have heart attacks for a few brief moments… especially since it sounded the most… otherworldly, and threatening, thus far.
“Alright, chud monkeys! You better start giving me answers right now, or I’ll rip your guts out and shove ‘em down your throats!”
After calming down, the three turned their attention to the general direction where they thought the voice was coming from… the water.
“Who the fuck are you?! And why are you in the sewer water?!” Nathan yelled.
The inhuman voice was silent for a moment before replying, “...This is sewer water?”
“Well… I assume so, at least, when I go off of the smell.”
“Well I don’t smell anything.”
“Thank you!” the voice of Cameron exclaimed. “See? I told you!”
Nathan rolled his eyes before hearing the inhuman voice say something again.
“Well, considering what happened the last time I woke up, something might have happened to my sense of smell. Don’t ask.” The voice sighed. “I suppose I’ll take your word for it.”
After that, the other three heard the sound of something big emerging from the water and crawling onto the concrete.
Nathan (and the others near him) got into a fighting stance just in case whatever had emerged from the water were to try anything funny.
“Alright, now enough with the chit-chat! You better tell me where I am, who you are, and why my voice sounds like I’m gargling marbles!”
“Well, I’m Cameron,” Cameron said. “My friend Nathan is somewhere over there, and the other guy is apparently named Caleb. He’s just as confused as you. Hell, we all are, though, we’re pretty sure those cultists dragged us to some kind of sewer or something. Also, I have no idea what’s up with your voice, bro. Sorry.”
The inhuman voice began to respond when a final voice came out of the darkness.
“HOLY-- *cough* *cough* WHAT’S THAT SMELL?!”
“Aha! See!” Nathan, turning in Cameron’s face and pointing a victorious finger his way (or at least where he thought it was). “Suck it!”
“Okay *cough*, wha--” the final voice gasped audibly before falling silent for a few moments. Nathan and the others stood there in uncomfortable silence before the voice responded. “...Y-You there! In the green shirt! How… how in the hell are you not freaking out when you’re surrounded by monsters!?”
Nathan took a second to process the question. “The hell are you talking about? And how did you know that I’m wearing a green shirt? It’s pitch black in here!”
The voice was silent for another moment. “Run.”
Nathan was bewildered by the simple statement. “Wha--” Before he could finish, he heard the sound of footsteps racing towards him. He raised his arms to defend himself, but nothing happened to him. Instead, he heard something quickly climbing up what sounded like a ladder. Right after that, he heard something heavy being tossed up into the air, and a beam of light revealed a figure jump out of a hole in the ceiling and race off in a random direction.
“A way out!” Cameron yelled.
Nathan immediately grabbed ahold of the ladder and climbed out of the smelly prison.
After crawling on his belly into what appeared to be an alley, Nathan realized he was in some kind of city. A big one by the size and style of the buildings on either of the alley’s sides. He couldn’t tell exactly which since a lot of them had areas he’d be hard pressed to tell apart, but he liked to think he was either in Los Angeles or New York because, seriously, every other big city in the country just copied them anyways. Not the best logic, but really, after his night, he was well beyond thinking straight at this point.
But before, he could in more of his surroundings, something else caught his attention.
It was the full moon... just barely visible through some storm clouds...
Nathan did nothing except for stare up into the lunar body.
Something about it was just… so... hypnotic...
Oliver stood near the entrance of the alley, ignoring the rain drops that had just begun to fall on him. He didn’t know why exactly he was just standing there. He should have been running for his life from the literal monsters that were going to come after him soon, but then, he supposed he was just so shocked by what he had seen in the city outside that the shock of seeing most of the whole Classic Universal Horror canon lined up in front of him paled in comparison.
A bunch of colorful, talking, flying, horn-bearing, ass tattoo wearing horseys. He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t (1): seen them walking and flying around, (2): rubbed his eyes and pinched himself before checking again, and (3): heard one of them call out to another one to tell them about some fashion show.
“This is it. I’m dead. I’ve died and gone to hell. Oh Lucifer! You come out of thine shadows now and impale me with a fiery pitchfork already! This is too much!”
However, instead of the father of lies appearing to sentence him to some kind of tortue for the rest of eternity like he expected, his shout prompted a pegasus mare to stop fleeing the storm that was coming and check out what the commotion was.
“What’s going on? Are you--?” the mare froze and stared at Oliver, who just stared right back. Oliver said nothing, still hoping that the pegasus standing in front of him was actually Satan in disguise and that he was going to rip his disguise off and laugh in his face.
The silence between them was broken when a chorus of screams sounded out from behind him as each of the former humans were confronted with their new forms.
“Okay, Satan,” Oliver said to the shell-shocked pegasus mare. “Can I just please get this whole thing over wi--”
The mare let out an ear-splitting scream before flying away as fast as her wings could propel her. Oliver stood there for a moment before a few other ponies who were also trying to escape the oncoming storm became concerned enough by the mare’s scream that they decided to check out what had frightened her, each of them as shocked as she had been when they spied Oliver... and the figures behind him.
Oliver raised an eyebrow. “So... wait... I’m not dead?”
As soon as he said that, a large, wolf-like creature tackled him from behind, sending the both of them landing in front of the gathered ponies, who scattered in a shrieking stampede in every other direction. Then, the wolf proceeded to try… dig into its meal with a single, decisive clamp of its foaming maw around Oliver's neck. However… Oliver, with a sense of speedy, reactive instinct he didn’t know he had, managed to grab either part of the wolf’s jaw with either hand and, with strength he also didn’t know he had, managed to struggle against the lupine’s mouth, keeping its chompers from digging in deep enough to be lethal.
“Okay! Not dead! Not dead! Not yet! Not yet! Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!” Oliver yelled before kicking back against the lupine’s stomach so hard that it flew off of him and back into the alley. “Fuck this shit, I’m out!” Oliver scrambled to his feet and dashed down the streets of the pony city at inhuman speeds, the wolf hot on his heels. “Nope, nope, nope, nope...”
“Shit!”
“What the fuck?!”
“AGH!”
The three former humans backed away from each other and stared at one another... and themselves... in horror. It was plain for all of them to see that they were no longer the humans they had once been.
Cameron’s skin was rotted and, along with old and brittle bones, evident through the gaps and tears in his otherwise, gauze-like wrapping covered body. He was a mummy.
Caleb had grown tall and bulky, more so than humanly possible. The skin that was visible under the ragged, worn out clothes he wore was a dark green color, stitches covering his sturdy hide and two metal bolts popped out of his neck. Anyone with a brain would know that he was Frankenstein’s monster.
Finally, Cody had transformed into some kind of human-fish hybrid. Scales and fins covered his body, sharp teeth jutted out of his mouth and equally sharp claws came out of his webbed hands. Anyone who was savvy in the way of classic movies would figure out that Cody was now the splitting image of the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
The three of them were so mortified that they almost didn’t notice Nathan begin to transform. Almost. The three could only watch, sickened, as the painful transformation took place. His snout elongated, hair sprouted all over his body, and all of his bones and organs shifted to more resemble those of a wolf’s.
Once the transformation was complete, the wolf looked over at the three monsters briefly before focusing on Oliver. It licked its lips before pouncing on him, attempting to turn him into a meal. Oliver fought back and escaped, Nathan in hot pursuit.
“Nathan?!” Cameron yelled once he regained his voice. “H-Hey! Wait up!” Cameron then took off after his friend.
Caleb and Cody stood in the alley for a few minutes, their minds still processing everything that was happening. Finally, Cody broke the silence.
“Screw it, I’m out.” Caleb watched as Cody climbed back into the sewers and pulled the grate back over the manhole.
Just as the grate slid back into place, the beam of a flashlight was shined into Caleb’s face. He shielded his visage with his massive hand and looked back to the entrance of the alley, where a bunch of ponies dressed in police uniforms were staring him down with nightsticks hanging off belts on cute, little adorable pants they were wearing.
“... You’ve got to be kidding me,” Caleb muttered.
